ARIA: Media types and CSS generated content in accessible text determination

Re: http://www.w3.org/WAI.new/PF/aria/complete#namecalculation

ARIA's accessible text determination method includes CSS generated content:

"because it is possible to specify textual content using the CSS :before and :after pseudo-elements, it is necessary for user agents to combine such content with the text referenced by the text nodes to produce a complete text alternative."

When UAs are generated accessible text, should they only include CSS generated content from the media type they are rendering (typically "screen") and ignore CSS generated content for other modalities that might be relevant to AT (such as the CSS 2.1 "speech" and "braille" types, or the proposed "reader" media type). If so, it would be good to make that explicit.

It might be a good idea to have UAs expose multiple sets of accessible text, as calculated for different media types, /if/ this wouldn't impose an unacceptable performance cost on UAs and accessibility platforms would allow that. That way AT could takes its pick.

--
Benjamin Hawkes-Lewis

Received on Monday, 13 September 2010 07:02:38 UTC